The PTCL Research and Development Fund has approved nine projects worth Rs 10.58 million to promote research and development in various sectors with focus on information technology and telecommunication. The approval to the projects was given at the 27th meeting of the committee chaired by Minister for Information Technology Awais Ahmad Khan and attended by Secretary Ministry of Information Technology Khalid Saeed, and PTCL President Junaid Iqbal Khan and member heads of various research organizations and academic institutions amongst others.
The meeting also approved Rs 2 million funding to Pakistan Software Export Board for undertaking ‘Research Development Entrepreneur Search’ to encourage entrepreneurship within the IT and telecom sector with specific focus on commercialization.
Competitions will be held in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad in April and May 2005 among 80 local students and entrepreneurs for locating promising and commercially viable ideas/business plans for which financing could be sought to enhance the probability of success of such startups.
The meeting also agreed to provide assistance to Institute of Business Administration Karachi for holding a two-day international conference on information and communication technologies in the last week of August this year. The conference to be attended by 400 local and 22 foreign professionals aims at capturing the new wealth of research initiated by scholars indicted by the Higher education Commission and enhancing interaction between local and overseas scientists and fostering tangible focus on socio-economic problems. The meeting also approved Rs 1.9 million funding for the project titled ‘Design of generic controller for scheduling calls on high-density VoIP media gateway’, a grant for ‘Urdu morphological analyzer’, funding for the ‘Computerization of the classical scripts tyles of Urdu and other regional languages’ project and a grant for ‘Development of a framework for Urdu handwriting recognition on handheld computing devices’.
Under its ‘support for Pakistani scientists and engineers to participatein science conferences as speakers’, the Fund committee recommended grants for scholars to attend various research workshops and conferences.
